Teaching SEO At Humber College – Spring 2016

Starting in early 2016, I resumed teaching SEO at Humber College, Lakeshore campus on Tuesday nights. This is part of the Humber Continuing Education program that reaches out to business professionals and accepts students of all stripes.

Last year I met Sam Dhutia of QFoods Canada who brought a real challenge into the classroom. He was just about to get busy selling gourmet chocolate bars on Sweets Canada and he asked myself and even some of the other students for help spreading the word. Sam is very generous and rewarded all our curiosity about his business with some of the best tasting chocolate we’d ever tried.

Teaching a weekly SEO class is something I really enjoy doing because I end up learning good information from the students, and pretty much every time someone asks me a question it forces me to think about the subject matter from another perspective.

SEO is an evolving discipline and the ideology that I pass on to students is that search engines can only work with what you give them, and every incoming link helps answer Google’s primary question, ‘Who Cares?’

We discuss measurement in every class, and I try to differentiate between various SEO content marketing strategies as they relate to different clients in different industries and business niches.

Last week while rounding out the 2nd lesson of 2016, we had a guest speaker.

Mike Cloke from Blueprint Internet Marketing visited the classroom and gave an inspiring talk on how to use the various free digital tools together to create a powerful marketing mix for both capturing and converting web traffic. The man and his ad agency specializes in lead generation and lead nurturing. Without giving away too much of his special sauce, let me summarize his strategy as being what i would call smart Email Marketing with Facebook and Twitter ‘whiskers’. You can see a terrific video on his website that better explains his strategy without euphemisms.

Blueprint Internet Marketing had a big impact on the class because they got to see the role of good SEO in a smart ecommerce marketing strategy.